Defying Gravity
Author: Garrett Soden
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9780393326567
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"Riveting....A must-read history of daredevilry and gravity sports."--San Francisco Chronicle
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Extreme Landscapes of Leisure
Author: Patrick Laviolette
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-04-15
Total Pages: 227
ISBN-13: 1317137051
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn recent years, there has been an increased engagement throughout the social sciences with the study of extreme places and practices. Dangerous games and adventure tours have shifted from being marginal, exotic or mad to being more than merely acceptable. They are now exemplary, mainstream even: there are a variety of new types, increasing numbers of people are doing them and they are being appropriated and have infiltrated more and more contexts. This book argues that hazardous sports and adventure tourism have become rather paradoxical. As a set of activities where players and holidaymakers are closer to death or danger than they would otherwise be, they are the complete opposite of normal games or vacations. Adventure sports and tours reverse the general definition of a holiday as being an escape from the seriousness of everyday life, as in most cases, they are innately serious, requiring as they do 'life or death' decision-making. Beginning with the rise in colonial explorations and moving on to consider the Dangerous Sports Club of Oxford, this book examines the increasing phenomena of adventure sports such as bungy jumping, cliff jumping or 'tomb-stoning', surfing and parkour within a framework of positive risk. It explores how certain assumptions about knowledge, agency, the body and nature are beginning to coalesce around newly developing spheres of social relations. Additionally, extreme games have become activities that are germane to the dawning of green social thought and so the book also addresses issues that deal with the intimate connections that exist between pleasure and the moral responsibility towards the environment.
Liminality and the Modern
Author: Bjørn Thomassen
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2016-05-06
Total Pages: 263
ISBN-13: 1317105044
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis book provides the history and genealogy of an increasingly important subject: liminality. Coming to the fore in recent years in social and political theory and extending beyond is original use as developed within anthropology, liminality has come to denote spaces and moments in which the taken-for-granted order of the world ceases to exist and novel forms emerge, often in unpredictable ways. Liminality and the Modern offers a comprehensive introduction to this concept, discussing its development and laying out a conceptual and experiential framework for thinking about change in terms of liminality. Applying this framework to questions surrounding the implosion of ’non-spaces’, the analysis of major historical periods and the study of political revolution, the book also explores its possible uses in social science research and its implications for our understanding of the uncertainty and contingency of the liquid structures of modern society. Shedding new light on a concept central to social thought, as well as its capacity for pushing social and political theory in new directions, this book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and philosophy working in fields such as social, political and anthropological theory, cultural studies, social and cultural geography, and historical anthropology and sociology.
Sport Sociology
Author: Paul Beedie
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2010-05-24
Total Pages: 260
ISBN-13: 1844457265
DOWNLOAD EBOOK"A welcome addition for those who teach sports studies... Used as a primer, this book provides readers with excellent introduction to the key sociological concepts, methods, and theories, and, also offers useful examples and contextualised discussions that beginners to the realm of sociology will no doubt appreciate. Beedie has compiled for students a good companion text that could certainly be used in conjunction with more detailed books, and, to guide students through more complex academic texts. Students have certainly appreciated Beedie's efforts to help them apply sociological rigour to analysing their sporting worlds, identities and experiences." - Geoffery Kohe, Worcester University "This should be highly useful for any sports studies students who are encountering the sociology of sport for the first time, even those who have previously studied sociology." - Alison Cain, Hertfordshire University Sociology is central to the study of sport in higher education. This reader-friendly textbook introduces all of the subject’s core themes, such as power, diversity and mediation, and relates them to major contemporary social issues such as commercialisation and globalisation. Special emphasis is given throughout to examples drawn from the UK and to the significance of the 2012 Olympics. Theoretical explanation is fully supported by case studies, practical and reflective exercises and guidance on further study.
Encyclopedia of Play in Today's Society
Author: Rodney P. Carlisle
Publisher: SAGE
Published: 2009-04-02
Total Pages: 1033
ISBN-13: 1412966701
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSelected as an Outstanding Academic Title by Choice Magazine, January 2010 The Encyclopedia of Play: A Social History explores the concept of play in history and modern society in the United States and internationally. Its scope encompasses leisure and recreation activities of children as well as adults throughout the ages, from dice games in the Roman empire to video games today. As an academic social history, it includes the perspectives of several curricular disciplines, from sociology to child psychology, from lifestyle history to social epidemiology. This two-volume set will serve as a general, non-technical resource for students in education and human development, health and sports psychology, leisure and recreation studies and kinesiology, history, and other social sciences to understand the importance of play as it has developed globally throughout history and to appreciate the affects of play on child and adult development, particularly on health, creativity, and imagination.
Vanity Fair's Schools For Scandal
Author: Graydon Carter
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2017-08-15
Total Pages: 400
ISBN-13: 150117374X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKA collection of essays focuses on the political, sexual, and administrative scandals that have recently rocked college and prep school campuses, from the Duke lacrosse team's rape case to the allegations against the now-closed Trump University.
Because She Thought She Loved Me
Author: Maxim Jakubowski
Publisher:
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 204
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMaxim Jakubowski's new novel continues with the same dark and erotic journeys his characters took in It's You That I Want to Kiss and Life in the World of Women (both available from Dufour). It's a relentless yarn leading up to the new Millennium in New York's Times Square, a story of love and obsession on a grand scale. The course of true love doesn't run easy when your husband is a powerful pornographer who controls most of the shady side of the Internet. And when a tender love affair runs out of control, desperate measures are needed to stop the darkness engulfing its frantic protagonists. This is a thrilling descent into the heart of sexual madness, moving in overdrive from London's West End, via the sinister private sex clubs of Paris, to the no-holds-barred illegal strip-joints of New York City.
The Strange Adventures of the Dangerous Sports Club
Author: Martin Lyster
Publisher:
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 0
ISBN-13: 9781899344284
DOWNLOAD EBOOKBungee jumping (the first from Golden Gate Bridge) and BASE jumping, cliff jumping and hang-gliding (off Kilimanjaro), skiing down almost vertical slopes in double-decker London buses, jumping off huge bridges in oversized kangaroo costumes -- this is the inside story of an informal group of amateur adventurers who broke laws, legs, and chandeliers around the world, leaving a trail of crashed cars, unpaid bills, empty bottles, and over-turned conventions in their wake. World famous (they were on "That's Incredible" and "immortalized" in the film "The History of the Dangerous Sports Club") and little understood, they were a mixture of artists and engineers, soldiers and academics, an MP, and one of the Monty Python team (Graham Chapman), united by their interest in creative forms of excitement. Lyster, an accomplished skydiver and hang-glider, was involved in the club throughout the '80s, traces the progress of the club from its beginnings at Oxford, through its heydey of innovation and entertainment, to its eventual decline into chaos and irrelevance. Strange Adventures is a story of English eccentrics and adventurers: real-life Phineas Foggs. It's a tale of nerve, drunkenness, and wild spending; of movies, sponsors, and TV shows; of surrealism, irresponsibility, and bounced checks; of hugh public recognition and utter commercial failure....it's the story of the Dangerous Sports Club.
